One curious corollary is that if the human brain is a Turing machine, then humans can never decide this issue either
Well, since thousands of years of human society hasn't produced a definitive, objective, and universal bit of moral reasoning, I'm going with a big fat "DUH!" here.
There's an awful lot of people who think killing is a terrible sin, unless you're doing to someone in the form of punishment.
Or that abortion is murder, and murder is bad, unless you happen to be bombing civilians as collateral damage while looking for terrorists.
Hell, so I'm not singling anybody out, there are "Buddhists" who are advocating the killing of Muslims.
If humanity can't arrive at a definitive answer to these questions, how the heck is an algorithm supposed to do it? Especially when the algorithm has to be written by humans and will have all sorts of vague fuzzy elements.
We couldn't even define the problem adequately for an algorithm to do. These are the kinds of Big Questions which people still try to answer.
See, there is already a fund which is supposed to pay for everybody getting broadband.
The companies collecting that aren't actually investing in expanding broadband except where it makes them more profit, not where it's needed.
So, a telecom tax proposed by someone who is a well known shill for the telecom industry... I'm not buying it.
Anything which Wheeler proposes at this point, I'm going to assume is designed to line the pockets of industry, and will do nothing at all for the people they claim this will.
Won't someone think of the children, my ass. This is just a cash grab, plain and simple.
Sure, but when you have outages and stability issues which impact your business, is it really a good trade off?
I mostly see this as a management fail -- penny wise and pound foolish.
I will be curious to see what percent of companies who went to the cloud will transition back to doing stuff in-house, and just how much that will really cost them in the long run.
If you don't own and operate your own infrastructure, you're at the mercy of someone else.
And clearly that someone else can't guarantee you robustness with this magic cloud.
All of these people who say "awesome, because, cloud" -- well, I have yet to be convinced that any of these vendors can provide as much uptime and reliability as a decent IT department.
I suggest we start calling it Clown Computing -- you cram a lot of Clowns into a tiny little car, and hope it keeps going.
Yearly vehicle safety inspections are required in Ontario for regular cars
So, I'll flat out say to you: bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit.
As in, you're spewing bullshit. You're spewing so much bullshit it isn't even funny. Are you even aware that what you say is bullshit? You clearly do not own a motor vehicle in Ontario.
There is no such thing as annual safety inspections of private, non-commercial motor vehicles in Ontario.
I have owned a motor vehicle in Ontario for almost 20 years. You periodically have to do an emissions test. When you buy and sell it needs an inspection.
But you do not, and have not for at least the last 20 years, have to do an annual motor vehicle inspection in Ontario.
So these Uber guys? They're driving in their own personal vehicles with neither a commercial license, insurance, nor mandatory vehicle inspections.
In other words, Uber as a service is pretty much ignoring the law and claiming that it doesn't apply to them.
Basically, Uber is a bootleg taxi service, and the laws being applied have applied to all commercial car services for a very long time.
This isn't some powerful taxi lobby pulling strings behind the scenes. This is cities deciding that Uber is required to follow the same laws as everybody else.
Uber aren't the victims here. They're the idiots claiming they can decide the law doesn't apply to them and their drivers, and going ahead and doing it anyway.
I assumed because the article didn't actually bother to address either of those questions
Well, here's the crux of the issue from the grandparent post about the cyclist getting hit:
Passers-by took a note of the car's registration, and while Uber said it was one of its vehicles, it added that it bore no responsibility for what had happened since the driver is classed as a 'partner' and not an employee.
So, basically Uber wants to play in the game, but wants to have no liability.
At which point, Uber is full of shit, and trying to make up their own interpretation of the law.
In other words, Uber is just a greedy corporation, who thinks they can piggy back off this stuff and make money, but be exempt from the laws.
Sorry, but Uber isn't doing nearly enough to meet the legal obligations, they're just claiming they don't have any legal obligations.
Uber wants to play both sides of this game. And, really, that's not one of their options.
Overall, seems to me like making sure he has insurance would make sense to be part of their due diligence in using him as a driver
Well, Uber has been trying to come into my city. I've heard coverage of them trying to come into other cities.
The city says "you need the following in order to be able to legally do this".
Uber says "no we don't, we're special, we're not a cab company, we just have an app and send people out".
Having heard Uber's reps more or less state that the law doesn't apply to them because they don't like it, I'm more or less convinced you have to assume Uber is lying, Uber knows that they're lying, and are trying a bit of a public shell game to make themselves look like the good guys. Their interpretation of the law is sophistry at best. Blatantly lying at worst.
But they've ignored the requirements for commercial drivers licenses, insurance, and more detailed background checks.
Basically, they're skirting around the law and claiming the law doesn't apply because they don't want it to.
I don't get the impression they care about anything else than their own business model. And they want to decree that certain laws don't apply.
But, really, they have no legal basis to say that existing regulations don't apply to them. They like to couch themselves as an alternative to taxis, but they don't want to be on the same playing field as them.
Sorry, but a company isn't special and exempt from the law just because they say so.
So, for decades we've had med school people doing dissections, we've had autopsies, we've had people doing MRIs and all sorts of other things... and we really had a situation where nobody ever put up their hand and said "umm, guys, WTF is this, it's not in the diagram?"
That's just bizarre to me.
However this reaffirms the necessity of good old fashioned paper libraries maintained by librarians.
'Discovering' a piece of anatomy which had been forgotten about for a century isn't something you would do with throwing away your old books and digitizing the new ones.
I assume the driver had insurance which he carried separately
Did he have the proper kind of drivers license and insurance? Did anybody verify that or check before he started giving rides?
In many places, you need a commercial/chauffeur license to drive a car for hire. And you need special insurance for your commercial liability.
So, big deal, Uber suspended his account.
Uber is basically washing their hands of it, and saying "driver's fault". Unfortunately, the people who passed the laws are saying "yeah, but you see, you're the one dispatching rides by people without the proper license and insurance, which is why we said you can't be here in the first place".
So, basically Uber is encouraging people to be taking paid rides from people who don't have the proper license, and those people out in the wild get into accidents, then we discover they don't have proper insurance, and then Uber just says "wow, not us".
The problem is the Uber service isn't legally compliant to begin with.
Well, these are issues about licensing and proper insurance. Legally, you are required to have a commercial license and proper insurance, not be some guy driving around with neither.
These aren't regulations designed to protect the taxi industry. These are regulations which have been imposed on the taxi industry by the city. You know, to ensure the people are registered, accountable, safe, and can demonstrate a maintenance record on the vehicles.
So when Uber says "oh, nonsense, we don't need to do that, we're just a tech company" -- well, one pretty much thinks they're full of shit.
So, big deal, you make an app which lets people effectively run a bootleg cab. If you think your bootleg cabs are immune from regulations because you say so, you're wrong.
Like it or not, the regulations exist, existed before Uber, and apply to all things doing business like this.
You can't wave your hands and pretend like they don't apply to you.
And when you say "we don't care, we're going to do it anyway"... don't be surprised when the city decides they're going to call your service and fine your drivers.
Put yourself in Uber's shoes, you are running a company and getting somewhat hostile media treatment
See, my problem with this statement is that on the surface Uber is the source of their own bad PR.
I've seen some of the news coverage about them trying to move into a couple of cities. The cities are saying "OK, you need a license, the proper insurance, and you must do these things".
Uber says "Yarg, we're not a taxi company, we're teh interweb company, we won't play by the rules".
At which point you think, "wow, so these guys figure they're exempt from regulations". And then you don't have a lot of sympathy for them.
If you blatantly say that you don't believe the law applies to you, you deserve all the bad PR you get. Your magic interweb business model doesn't exempt you from that.
You try to rebut them but you are simple not given the same air time the critics are. What should you do just bend over an take it, let them damage your business. I for one would much rather erode peoples faith in the source, and opposition research is how you do that!
See, I think this "whole smear the source, screw the facts" mentality is complete and utter crap.
It's just public muck raking to obfuscate the issue. In some cases, they simply refuse to acknowledge the basis for the criticism and pretend like their magical unicorns exempt them from reality.
So, I'm of the opinion anyone who engages in "opposition research" is probably a lying, evil, twisted sack of shit of a PR guy, who engages in a "win at any cost" level of bullshit.
It has nothing to do with facts, just digging up dirt to discredit them and distract people from the fact that, yes, you do actually eat babies.
Well, who else should/would they gratuitously shill for?
Bah, in all likelihood it's to an article on Dice.com which is just a summary of a well written article elsewhere.
I don't expect anything from Dice.com to give me first-hand insights on anything, just whatever their advertisers and executives want to hawk this week.
Sorry, but Slashdot has gone downhill since Dice.com, and many of us will point that out at every chance we get.
I'd guess you can configure/. not to even show them
No, you can't, and that's the problem.
I can't click something and be done with this clown. Because multiple Slashdot editors post his crap.
Short of stringing up some editors, or a lot of really loud angry posts, we do not have any easy means to say "do not wish to see this crap".
Which means you can guarantee every one of this posts will get this kind of response.
If they would give us a check box to say "do not wish to see any shit from Bennett Haselton", that would be preferable. Instead we're all forced to read his opinion on everything.
Hey Bennett, what's your opinion of getting kicked in the nuts? Have you done extensive testing to tell us it hurts?
It's just the average type of their degrees are located firmly in law schools. They know how to be completely unambiguous in how they describe their wrong beliefs.
Oh no... they know how to be completely ambigious and open ended in their wrong beliefs, just like a lawyer.
Give yourself lots of wiggle room, and some extra play for the people who paid you, and take no ownership and responsibility for what you do.
Lawyers know how to turn ambiguity to their benefit.
There is no technological solution. (The phone system as a whole is just so old).
There is no human solution. (The other company will not bother).
And, as far as I can tell, there isn't really much of a legal solution either.
See, the large companies who need to do callouts who got themselves some exemptions in the laws? They need to be sure that the people who call on their behalf show with their caller ID.
So the "legitimate" companies need to be able to spoof their caller ID, and they don't want it to be illegal to spoof your caller ID.
They, unfortunately, use the same kind of overseas call centers as are used in these scams. In some cases, I suspect the exact same call centers.
So, the root cause issue here is that the big players pushed for exemptions in the law, to be sure they could have whatever call center they need call out as if it was from a given number. In effect, they legalized spoofing caller ID.
That the shady players take advantage of that, and usually call from overseas locations where you'll never get the law to do anything... well, that's the problem. But, this was predictable.
I have my cordless phone set to drop any call which is Unknown or Private, I pretty much won't answer calls from 800 numbers, and I won't answer calls from numbers I don't recognize... because they've made call display so useless as to be something you can't trust.
I believe if it was made illegal to spoof caller ID, this could be stopped. But, the big players don't want it illegal to spoof caller ID, and the paid a lot of money for lobbyists to give them an exemption.
Unfortunately, this same exemption now exists for the people running scams.
Surprise!!
Ever exemption in the Do Not Call list pretty much made the legislation toothless and useless. And this, is quite logically, the expected outcome.
Once again, the exceptionalism by businesses means the laws surrounding this are pretty much useless.
"So, yes, some of us are still being paranoid. But that doesn't mean that we're not right."
Spoken like a true paranoid.
Why, thank you. That's the nicest thing anybody has said to me all week.
Look, if the reality wasn't that the surveillance programs in place are far more invasive, sophisticated, and all encompassing than we've ever thought possible, I would happily be a slightly paranoid guy in the corner tilting at windmills. I'm OK with that. Everybody needs a hobby, and it's fun at parties.
The reality is, stuff which we know to be happening is far more widespread than anybody would have believed. They've demonstrated themselves willing to lie to Congress. They get funding from alternate sources which they don't always tell us about. They don't always care about the niceties of the law.
They've colluded with law enforcement to conceal their ways and means, and come up with ways to charge you and hide how they got there by writing a handbook of perjury and lying.
They can use secret laws to make it illegal to tell anybody the scope of what they're actually doing.
So, the problem becomes... when a high degree of paranoia has been demonstrated to be not nearly paranoid enough... being somewhat paranoid becomes pretty much mandatory.
And these guys have made what would have been dismissed as merely paranoid ravings only a few years ago into something which is documented and commonplace.
So, yeah, I sound paranoid. Because the people who make me paranoid have upped their game to the level where it's hard to imagine I'm being paranoid enough.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, since thousands of years of human society hasn't produced a definitive, objective, and universal bit of moral reasoning, I'm going with a big fat "DUH!" here.
There's an awful lot of people who think killing is a terrible sin, unless you're doing to someone in the form of punishment.
Or that abortion is murder, and murder is bad, unless you happen to be bombing civilians as collateral damage while looking for terrorists.
Hell, so I'm not singling anybody out, there are "Buddhists" who are advocating the killing of Muslims.
If humanity can't arrive at a definitive answer to these questions, how the heck is an algorithm supposed to do it? Especially when the algorithm has to be written by humans and will have all sorts of vague fuzzy elements.
We couldn't even define the problem adequately for an algorithm to do. These are the kinds of Big Questions which people still try to answer.
See, there is already a fund which is supposed to pay for everybody getting broadband.
The companies collecting that aren't actually investing in expanding broadband except where it makes them more profit, not where it's needed.
So, a telecom tax proposed by someone who is a well known shill for the telecom industry ... I'm not buying it.
Anything which Wheeler proposes at this point, I'm going to assume is designed to line the pockets of industry, and will do nothing at all for the people they claim this will.
Won't someone think of the children, my ass. This is just a cash grab, plain and simple.
Sure, but when you have outages and stability issues which impact your business, is it really a good trade off?
I mostly see this as a management fail -- penny wise and pound foolish.
I will be curious to see what percent of companies who went to the cloud will transition back to doing stuff in-house, and just how much that will really cost them in the long run.
Cloud fail, like nobody saw that coming.
If you don't own and operate your own infrastructure, you're at the mercy of someone else.
And clearly that someone else can't guarantee you robustness with this magic cloud.
All of these people who say "awesome, because, cloud" -- well, I have yet to be convinced that any of these vendors can provide as much uptime and reliability as a decent IT department.
I suggest we start calling it Clown Computing -- you cram a lot of Clowns into a tiny little car, and hope it keeps going.
When something goes wrong, hilarity ensues.
So, all these people who say the Democrats are the party of government surveillance, and the Republicans aren't ... what's your answer to this?
My answer is that both parties have decided that security at any costs, and privacy be damned is the way of the future.
So can we stop having this surveillance crap be a matter of "your party did it" and realize they're all willing to do this crap?
Or would that interfere with your need to blame someone else? Both parties are clearly unwilling to stop this crap.
So, I'll flat out say to you: bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit.
As in, you're spewing bullshit. You're spewing so much bullshit it isn't even funny. Are you even aware that what you say is bullshit? You clearly do not own a motor vehicle in Ontario.
There is no such thing as annual safety inspections of private, non-commercial motor vehicles in Ontario.
I have owned a motor vehicle in Ontario for almost 20 years. You periodically have to do an emissions test. When you buy and sell it needs an inspection.
But you do not, and have not for at least the last 20 years, have to do an annual motor vehicle inspection in Ontario.
There are some classes of commercial vehicles which do get inspected annually.
So these Uber guys? They're driving in their own personal vehicles with neither a commercial license, insurance, nor mandatory vehicle inspections.
In other words, Uber as a service is pretty much ignoring the law and claiming that it doesn't apply to them.
Basically, Uber is a bootleg taxi service, and the laws being applied have applied to all commercial car services for a very long time.
This isn't some powerful taxi lobby pulling strings behind the scenes. This is cities deciding that Uber is required to follow the same laws as everybody else.
Uber aren't the victims here. They're the idiots claiming they can decide the law doesn't apply to them and their drivers, and going ahead and doing it anyway.
Well, here's the crux of the issue from the grandparent post about the cyclist getting hit:
So, basically Uber wants to play in the game, but wants to have no liability.
At which point, Uber is full of shit, and trying to make up their own interpretation of the law.
In other words, Uber is just a greedy corporation, who thinks they can piggy back off this stuff and make money, but be exempt from the laws.
Sorry, but Uber isn't doing nearly enough to meet the legal obligations, they're just claiming they don't have any legal obligations.
Uber wants to play both sides of this game. And, really, that's not one of their options.
Horseshit.
Some things they just keep secret.
Other things, they commit perjury and perform parallel construction to hide how they got it in the first place.
In other words, they don't need no steenking warrants, they don't need to care about the law, and will do anything they see fit.
They can take care of the pretense of following the law much later.
I'm long past believing they give a damn about needing to prove they obtained stuff legally.
Well, Uber has been trying to come into my city. I've heard coverage of them trying to come into other cities.
The city says "you need the following in order to be able to legally do this".
Uber says "no we don't, we're special, we're not a cab company, we just have an app and send people out".
Having heard Uber's reps more or less state that the law doesn't apply to them because they don't like it, I'm more or less convinced you have to assume Uber is lying, Uber knows that they're lying, and are trying a bit of a public shell game to make themselves look like the good guys. Their interpretation of the law is sophistry at best. Blatantly lying at worst.
But they've ignored the requirements for commercial drivers licenses, insurance, and more detailed background checks.
Basically, they're skirting around the law and claiming the law doesn't apply because they don't want it to.
I don't get the impression they care about anything else than their own business model. And they want to decree that certain laws don't apply.
But, really, they have no legal basis to say that existing regulations don't apply to them. They like to couch themselves as an alternative to taxis, but they don't want to be on the same playing field as them.
Sorry, but a company isn't special and exempt from the law just because they say so.
Dude, we're talking about doctors and neuroscientists here.
So, I place them firmly in the set of people who should be able to navigate this and would be capable of reading the schematics.
Well, apparently stuff we used to know 100 years ago we no longer know.
it's just hard to wrap my head around the notion that modern medicine just forgot about this, and haven't had it in their text books for that long.
Surely at some point someone would have said "Hey, check this out".
So, for decades we've had med school people doing dissections, we've had autopsies, we've had people doing MRIs and all sorts of other things ... and we really had a situation where nobody ever put up their hand and said "umm, guys, WTF is this, it's not in the diagram?"
That's just bizarre to me.
However this reaffirms the necessity of good old fashioned paper libraries maintained by librarians.
'Discovering' a piece of anatomy which had been forgotten about for a century isn't something you would do with throwing away your old books and digitizing the new ones.
Did he have the proper kind of drivers license and insurance? Did anybody verify that or check before he started giving rides?
In many places, you need a commercial/chauffeur license to drive a car for hire. And you need special insurance for your commercial liability.
So, big deal, Uber suspended his account.
Uber is basically washing their hands of it, and saying "driver's fault". Unfortunately, the people who passed the laws are saying "yeah, but you see, you're the one dispatching rides by people without the proper license and insurance, which is why we said you can't be here in the first place".
So, basically Uber is encouraging people to be taking paid rides from people who don't have the proper license, and those people out in the wild get into accidents, then we discover they don't have proper insurance, and then Uber just says "wow, not us".
The problem is the Uber service isn't legally compliant to begin with.
Well, these are issues about licensing and proper insurance. Legally, you are required to have a commercial license and proper insurance, not be some guy driving around with neither.
These aren't regulations designed to protect the taxi industry. These are regulations which have been imposed on the taxi industry by the city. You know, to ensure the people are registered, accountable, safe, and can demonstrate a maintenance record on the vehicles.
So when Uber says "oh, nonsense, we don't need to do that, we're just a tech company" -- well, one pretty much thinks they're full of shit.
So, big deal, you make an app which lets people effectively run a bootleg cab. If you think your bootleg cabs are immune from regulations because you say so, you're wrong.
Like it or not, the regulations exist, existed before Uber, and apply to all things doing business like this.
You can't wave your hands and pretend like they don't apply to you.
And when you say "we don't care, we're going to do it anyway" ... don't be surprised when the city decides they're going to call your service and fine your drivers.
See, my problem with this statement is that on the surface Uber is the source of their own bad PR.
I've seen some of the news coverage about them trying to move into a couple of cities. The cities are saying "OK, you need a license, the proper insurance, and you must do these things".
Uber says "Yarg, we're not a taxi company, we're teh interweb company, we won't play by the rules".
At which point you think, "wow, so these guys figure they're exempt from regulations". And then you don't have a lot of sympathy for them.
If you blatantly say that you don't believe the law applies to you, you deserve all the bad PR you get. Your magic interweb business model doesn't exempt you from that.
See, I think this "whole smear the source, screw the facts" mentality is complete and utter crap.
It's just public muck raking to obfuscate the issue. In some cases, they simply refuse to acknowledge the basis for the criticism and pretend like their magical unicorns exempt them from reality.
So, I'm of the opinion anyone who engages in "opposition research" is probably a lying, evil, twisted sack of shit of a PR guy, who engages in a "win at any cost" level of bullshit.
It has nothing to do with facts, just digging up dirt to discredit them and distract people from the fact that, yes, you do actually eat babies.
What Uber Douchebags.
Have we reached the point where companies might consider smear campaigns against critics as normal business?
Have they been learning from the politicians and lobbyists?
Pathetic.
See, any legitimate news organization would have to give a disclaimer about the relationship.
So, one of two things is happening:
Either Nerval's Lobster is purely created to make it look like someone is posting stuff. We'll call that astroturfing.
Or, option B, whatever this poor sod submits, some asshat changes to point to a dice.com clone of the article. We'll call that shilling.
And, yes, I can't see a single story posted by Nerval's Lobster which doesn't point to dice.
So I'm afraid we have to go with astroturfing and blatant shilling.
Thanks for pointing that out, now I can ignore crap from this poster as well the shit from Bennett fuck-me-in-the-ass Haselton.
Bah, in all likelihood it's to an article on Dice.com which is just a summary of a well written article elsewhere.
I don't expect anything from Dice.com to give me first-hand insights on anything, just whatever their advertisers and executives want to hawk this week.
Sorry, but Slashdot has gone downhill since Dice.com, and many of us will point that out at every chance we get.
And, here we go again, gratuitously shilling for dice.com.
No thanks.
No, you can't, and that's the problem.
I can't click something and be done with this clown. Because multiple Slashdot editors post his crap.
Short of stringing up some editors, or a lot of really loud angry posts, we do not have any easy means to say "do not wish to see this crap".
Which means you can guarantee every one of this posts will get this kind of response.
If they would give us a check box to say "do not wish to see any shit from Bennett Haselton", that would be preferable. Instead we're all forced to read his opinion on everything.
Hey Bennett, what's your opinion of getting kicked in the nuts? Have you done extensive testing to tell us it hurts?
I'm sorry, but this is getting absurd.
If Slashdot is going to be Bennett "aint I smug and pointless" Haselton's personal blog ....
Give us a STORY EXCLSUION for this clown.
I do not see value in Bennett and hit shit, and I don't care.
But apparently at least samzenpus and timothy with post any of the shit this idiot writes.
Seriously, just fucking make it stop. Nobody here gives a shit about Bennett Haselton. So give us a fucking way to stop reading his crap.
Oh no ... they know how to be completely ambigious and open ended in their wrong beliefs, just like a lawyer.
Give yourself lots of wiggle room, and some extra play for the people who paid you, and take no ownership and responsibility for what you do.
Lawyers know how to turn ambiguity to their benefit.
And, as far as I can tell, there isn't really much of a legal solution either.
See, the large companies who need to do callouts who got themselves some exemptions in the laws? They need to be sure that the people who call on their behalf show with their caller ID.
So the "legitimate" companies need to be able to spoof their caller ID, and they don't want it to be illegal to spoof your caller ID.
They, unfortunately, use the same kind of overseas call centers as are used in these scams. In some cases, I suspect the exact same call centers.
So, the root cause issue here is that the big players pushed for exemptions in the law, to be sure they could have whatever call center they need call out as if it was from a given number. In effect, they legalized spoofing caller ID.
That the shady players take advantage of that, and usually call from overseas locations where you'll never get the law to do anything ... well, that's the problem. But, this was predictable.
I have my cordless phone set to drop any call which is Unknown or Private, I pretty much won't answer calls from 800 numbers, and I won't answer calls from numbers I don't recognize ... because they've made call display so useless as to be something you can't trust.
I believe if it was made illegal to spoof caller ID, this could be stopped. But, the big players don't want it illegal to spoof caller ID, and the paid a lot of money for lobbyists to give them an exemption.
Unfortunately, this same exemption now exists for the people running scams.
Surprise!!
Ever exemption in the Do Not Call list pretty much made the legislation toothless and useless. And this, is quite logically, the expected outcome.
Once again, the exceptionalism by businesses means the laws surrounding this are pretty much useless.
Why, thank you. That's the nicest thing anybody has said to me all week.
Look, if the reality wasn't that the surveillance programs in place are far more invasive, sophisticated, and all encompassing than we've ever thought possible, I would happily be a slightly paranoid guy in the corner tilting at windmills. I'm OK with that. Everybody needs a hobby, and it's fun at parties.
The reality is, stuff which we know to be happening is far more widespread than anybody would have believed. They've demonstrated themselves willing to lie to Congress. They get funding from alternate sources which they don't always tell us about. They don't always care about the niceties of the law.
They've colluded with law enforcement to conceal their ways and means, and come up with ways to charge you and hide how they got there by writing a handbook of perjury and lying.
They can use secret laws to make it illegal to tell anybody the scope of what they're actually doing.
So, the problem becomes ... when a high degree of paranoia has been demonstrated to be not nearly paranoid enough ... being somewhat paranoid becomes pretty much mandatory.
And these guys have made what would have been dismissed as merely paranoid ravings only a few years ago into something which is documented and commonplace.
So, yeah, I sound paranoid. Because the people who make me paranoid have upped their game to the level where it's hard to imagine I'm being paranoid enough.
Which doesn't mean they don't also have massively expensive and complicated means to do the rest.
That last 1% is likely pretty high value.
Really, at this point, I don't think paranoid fears about what the spy agencies are doing comes even close to reality.
Things which we all "knew" 5-10 years ago to be completely impossible are being revealed as already happening.
They're not superhumans, but they have massive resources and funding (not all of which comes from the government).
So, yes, some of us are still being paranoid. But that doesn't mean that we're not right.